Experiences with Sense & Sensibility

Agripreneurship

A wonderful aspect of both young people and entrepreneurs is their ability to find creative solutions to apparently insoluble problems. The two overlap beautifully within the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) and the Youth Agripreneurs Project (YAP), where the goal is to pilot innovation to help rural communities world wide.

Kulisha, which is the verb ‘to feed’ in Swahili, the national language of Kenya, is a proposed project that addresses both the problem of creating a sustainable food source in Kenya and the extractive fishing methods of coastal trawlers. Aquaculture is an important food industry in East Africa, but the method of using fish meal from wild caught anchovies is destructive on all levels. Kulisha’s goal is to produce sustainable fish feed in Kenya made from black soldier fly larva.

Our idea, Kulisha, will provide a low-cost, high-quality sustainable fish feed made from black soldier fly larvae. We will sell dried insects to these rural fish farmers to replace the anchovies they are using to mix their own. In addition, we’ll produce a nutrient-rich fertilizer as a by-product from raising the insects which will be sold at a low cost to local crop farmers. It is our long term goal to formulate and sell our own feed.

Making animal feed from insects is revolutionary. The key problem with modern day aquaculture is that the current production of fish feed is both expensive and environmentally degrading. We will address both these issues, while stimulating a number of other positive externalities. Commercial insect production is a very novel sector and no companies are doing it in close collaboration with the local community.

We will work with the community to source organic waste such as old food scraps to feed the insects, thereby simultaneously addressing sanitation problems. Our system designs have a relatively low startup cost and use locally sourced materials, thus enabling easy technology transfer and scalability.

The students are part of a competition for funding, and the winners are based on the number of comments, likes and views each proposal gets, so we ask our readers to take a minute to check out their proposal, ask questions, give feedback and show some love and support for this incredible idea. (Even just commenting “this is a cool idea” will help them out, so please do!)